German town bans stumbling stone memorials to Nazi victims

However, Karin Prien, a member of the CDU, criticised the decision.

“Anyone who banishes Stolpersteine and memorial sites commemorating Jewish life from public spaces to the cemetery is prioritising death over life and rendering Jewish people invisible once again,” she told Bild.

She said her own CDU party in Saxony also bore responsibility for the decision.

Charlotte Knobloch, a Holocaust survivor and president of the Jewish Community in Munich, said that removing memorials from the cityscape was “completely the wrong approach”.

She told the Funke Media Group that she was “appalled that a democratic party would stoop to supporting such a transparent manoeuvre by the extremists of the AfD”.

Knobloch said that she was not a supporter of the stumbling stones, but added that “decentralised remembrance – which is not banished from public space but, on the contrary, permeates and shapes it” was crucial to a genuine culture of remembrance.

In her own city of Munich, there are no Stolpersteine on municipal land. Instead, the city allows memorial plaques on public buildings.

As the name suggests, Stolpersteine are intended as memorials people stumble upon, making them reflect on the history of their location.

Gunter Demnig, the artist who initiated the Stolperstein project, said that given the recent electoral successes of the AfD “it was certainly to be expected that something like this would happen”.

The AfD recently secured major victories in state elections in Saxony-Anhalt and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern.

Some branches of the populist AfD are classed as right-wing extremist by domestic intelligence, a designation the party strongly rejects.

Its anti-immigration, “Germany first” and Russian-friendly agenda has found fertile ground in the country’s former communist east.